Private schools will have to raise class sizes, experts warn

Private schools will have to increase class sizes and stop teaching niche subjects such as Latin and Greek if they are to still exist in 20 years' time, a report by education consultants will warn today.

In its overview of the UK's independent schools sector, MTM Consulting urges headteachers to start reining in their costs immediately and reduce the rate at which they are raising fees.

The study's authors drew on interviews with 836 families earning £50,000 a year or more, 31 private school headteachers and bursars and government data to predict the financial health of the schools in a decade and two decades' time. They found class sizes would have to grow by up to a quarter in at least half of all private schools, particularly those for primary-aged children, over the next 20 years.

Since 1981 private schools have reduced the number of pupils per teacher from 12.6 to 8.3 by investing in more teachers. In many schools teachers' salaries come to more than 50% of the school's total expenditure, and in some cases they account for 70% of it.

But this is not sustainable, argues one of the co-authors, Gavin Humphries, a business analyst. Private schools must cut costs to counter a predicted fall in pupils from 2017, to mitigate increased demands on them to offer more bursaries, and to ward against fees becoming out of reach for the parents they hope to attract.

Humphries said "certain sacred cows" needed to be challenged, including "having a pupil-teacher ratio of less than 10:1, which is a policy that has driven up schools' operating costs significantly".

The study found schools would have to cut specialist subjects, such as some modern foreign languages and Latin and Greek. Classes for these subjects may be smaller than for other subjects so this would reduce teaching costs, they argue.

The authors believe the number of pupils at private schools will increase between 2012 and 2015 from 605,000 to 611,000 because of cuts to the public sector, which will provoke "growing unrest" and will "drive parents towards independent schools".

But from 2017, they say, it is likely that "the trends of falling affordability and attractive free schools would reduce total independent school rolls by at least 1% per annum". Parents pay on average £11,250 per year in school fees, compared with £5,800 in 1999. Fees have risen about 6% each year for the last decade.

Geoff Lucas of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, which represents the heads of 243 independent schools, said: "This year, the level of fee increases has responded to the potential concern that we can't carry on putting up fees steeply. Increases are closer to 3%. We know parents value highly small classes in private schools. Many would say that increasing the class sizes would impair the quality and positive features that parents value in an independent education."